"The Liberator" by Alex Kershaw (2012)

It's been since, like last October since you have read a World War II book. Sometimes you just need to get your fix. The 'small unit history of European liberation' genre is what really got you into history books (well, that and "A People's History of the United States") so sometimes it is nice to indulge that original satisfaction and pick up a new one.

So, right off the bat you noticed that "The Liberator" is not the best written book that you've ever read. It isn't awful, but it wasn't particularly well written either. I guess not everyone can be Stephen E. Ambrose. But a book doesn't have to be perfectly written for the story to make an impact on a reader (I mean, they're making "Lone Survivor" into a movie and that book was so poorly written it's embarrassing). The first half of "The Liberator" felt like Kershaw was rushing it, sacrificing the story for the sake of the narrative. Maybe that is more his editor's fault than his, but it made for some awkward reading. Kershaw did, however, hit his stride about halfway through the book and it got considerably more enjoyable to read, but the first half was pretty rough.

The story mostly follows one man, Felix Sparks, from Arizona. Sparks would later become a general and a highly decorated veteran who liberated thousands of oppressed people, but he started his adult life as a train-hopping hobo just trying to survive the Great Depression. He eventually enlisted in the Army even before war broke out. Sparks was stationed in Hawaii, protecting the Navy from a traditional surface attack that would never come. He had been rotated back home when the Japanese attacked from the air instead.

Sparks left for war with his new wife pregnant and heading back to Arizona to have their baby near family. With all of the war books you've read, you'd think you would have gotten used to that kind of story, but you have not. It still fills you with awe and sad admiration that people are still being deployed to combat zones with pregnant wives back at home. How is anyone capable of such extraordinary sacrifice? How are soldiers able to put themselves in harm's way knowing that they have people back home counting on them to return, children who have never met them? But they did, and they do, and they probably will in the future as well.

Sparks was assigned to a National Guard unit formed from four Southwestern states, Arizona Colorado, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. For the first 15 years of the 45th Infantry Division's life, their shoulder patch was an insignia reflecting the Native American roots of their home states. The swastika was an ancient Indian symbol for good luck. The Nazi party had besmirched this ancient symbol and the 45th had retired its use for months, preferring to have no shoulder patch instead of sporting the symbol of the Third Reich. Just before they were shipped out to go fight those same Nazis, the 45th adopted another ancient native symbol to identify themselves. The Thunderbird was chosen, and the 45th, previously untested by battle, would soon get the chance to earn that patch in combat.

The 45th infantry soon landed in North Africa, but the fighting was already over on that continent since the Germans and Italians had fled back into the Mediterranean. Allied Command had plans to keep the pressure on the Axis and the 45th was soon landing on the beaches of Sicily. Sparks bristled at his posting as a staff officer (pencil pusher) and begged to be put in charge of a company. He got his wish and saw a mere month of combat before being wounded by falling friendly anti-aircraft artillery. Sparks was shipped to Algiers for recovery, but went AWOL and stowed away on a B-17 in order to get back to his men who were now fighting in Italy.

It's easy to forget how excruciating and costly the campaign in Italy was. Audy Murphy was the most decorated soldier in the history of the United States military. He was fighting in Sicily and Italy, too, his 3rd division was at the 45th's shoulder through most of the war. Murphy he titled his book about his experience "To Hell and Back" for a reason. The attrition suffered by the units fighting in Italy is almost inconceivable. It is not entirely accurate to say that Felix Sparks led E company during that campaign. Saying that implies that he led one group of about 150-200 men. After nine months in combat, however, the men who made up the company that had hit those Sicilian beaches were all gone. The men Sparks led now were brand new replacements, unknown to him.

"The Liberator" follows Sparks and his men on their ill-fated amphibious invasion of Anzio and the killing field that battle became. Sparks lost his entire company in February of '44 when the Germans tried to overrun the beaches. His entire company was lost, killed or captured, but the beach head remained in Allied hands. Somehow, Sparks alone survived and fought his way back to American lines. In 36 hours of combat, the entire 45th division lost 50% of their strength. The German commander in Italy, Albert Kesselring, the undisputed master of defensive warfare in World War II, was amazed at the tenacity of soldiers from a decadent democracy. He called their defense of that beach the Allies' greatest "epic of bravery."

The D-Day invasion of Normandy in June of '44 gets all the glory, but there was another amphibious invasion of France that most people forget about. Sparks and a few hundred thousand other soldiers stormed France's Mediterranean shores in August and pushed up from the south as well. The Germans fled from them like they never had in Italy, right back to the borders of their fatherland. The Americans swept through hundreds of miles of French wine country in a mere matter of weeks.

And then those Germans turned and struck back. Hitler had ordered a massive counteroffensive designed to drive a wedge between the American and British forces in Belgium. Eisenhower saw it as an opportunity and ordered Patton's entire Third Army to swing left and smash into the exposed Nazi flank. But the Americans to Patton's south had to stretch out to fill the gap his maneuver left along the German border.

As the whole world watched the Battle of the Bulge being fought far to his north, Felix Sparks, now a lieutenant colonel, watched a division of crack SS troops drive his men backwards over ground that had been dearly won. Colonel Sparks watched as his entire battalion was surrounded and chewed apart by some of the best troops in the German arsenal. His men, although being cut off, had orders to hold their ground and were refused repeated requests to attempt to fight back to American lines.

A relief force was sent to reinforce Sparks' men but became pinned down under accurate machine gun and mortar fire. Colonel Sparks commandeered two tanks and personally led the rescue mission to save the relief force. The SS watched as Sparks retrieved the wounded men. They had decided there was no honor in killing an officer who was rescuing wounded soldiers. Somehow, Kershaw was able to find and interview one of the SS soldiers who held his fire that day and watched in awe as this American colonel carried wounded men out of the line of fire and loaded them on to a tank heading for safety. In all your years of reading history books, you can only think of one other commander who would have done that. Irwin Rommel was famous for racing to the places his men were in the most danger too. Both Rommel and Sparks were compelled to fight alongside their men, at great personal risk, when almost all other commanders, on both sides, stayed back and gave orders from relative safety. Colonel Sparks lost his entire battalion that day, but he risked his life to do everything he could to save them. Comparing Sparks to Rommel may be a bit of a stretch (Sparks was never allowed the freedom of command that let Rommel's brilliance blossom) but you cannot think of higher praise.

Although the SS were fanatical Nazis, they were outstanding soldiers and earned the respect of the American Thunderbirds. At least, until those Americans found Dachau. Colonel Sparks didn't even know what 'concentration camp' meant until he saw one with his own eyes. As a young man, Sparks had searched for jobs by crisscrossing America in box cars. Outside of Dachau, he saw box cars filled with tortured and emaciated corpses. Trains had once given him a freedom that allowed him to survive the unintended calamities of the modern economic world. Now he saw what evil could be wrought with the purposeful inventions of that modern world. Trains turned to death traps. Factories promising death, not jobs. The machinery of the 20th Century had been twisted to churn out nightmares instead of dreams. And the farther into the camp he went, the more hellish the nightmares became.

His men couldn't handle the realities of what they were seeing, the inhumanity of it all. Some of his men snapped and in a rage summarily executed many of the men they found wearing SS uniforms in the death camp. The word inconceivable doesn't do justice to the horrors of the Holocaust. Faced with those horrors, the boys of the Depression momentarily lost their grip on sanity and exacted justice right there on the spot. Colonel Sparks had to fire his sidearm into the air to stop the killings (there is a picture of this moment in the book's first few pages). These executions were wrong, they were possibly a war crime, and they should not have happened, but you couldn't blame the Americans for their actions.

As the war came to a close, Sparks found himself in Munich, his headquarters in the famous Hofbrauhaus, the very beer hall where Hitler had tried to start a revolution with his "Beer Hall Putsch" back in 1923. When the war finally ended, the 45th Infantry Division had lost 90% of their original men either killed, wounded, or captured. They had replaced the entire number of their soldiers seven times since the invasion of Sicily. The Thunderbirds had fought for 511 days. Sparks had personally been through 8 campaigns, earned 2 Silver Stars, 2 Purple Hearts, and the French Croix de Guerre. He had taken part in the amphibious invasion of Sicily, Salerno, Anzio, and the French Riviera. His unit had liberated more people from Hitler's tyranny than anyone could accurately calculate, and he had a 2 year old son at home whom he had never laid eyes on.

"The Liberator" reminded you that there were more units fighting in World War II than just the fabled 101st Airborne. There were more outstanding commanders than just Patton. The famous battles were not the only battles. The Western Front was not the only front. Soldiers sacrificed their lives for plots of ground that are now inconsequential and forgotten, families left back home suffered in fear and uncertainty. This war was the single greatest event in human history. There are millions and millions of stories from the war that the world will never know about. It is estimated that over 500 US WWII veterans die every day. Many of them have yet to have their stories told. Books like this make you want to keep finding more of those stories.





On to the next book!